Weaponizing Nationalism on the Global Stage?

Vitriol in Pro-CCP Tweets Targeting Uyghur Diaspora Regime Critics


Allison Koh


Jonathan Nagler


Joshua A. Tucker

              


ISA Annual Convention
March 15, 2023

Motivation

Diasporas as Regime Threats

“Horizontal” networks at home 🏡
(Brinkerhoff 2009; Alonso and Oiarzabal 2010; Bernal 2020)

“Vertical” networks abroad 🌏
(Keck and Sikkink 1999; Michaelsen 2018; Esberg and Siegel 2020)

➡️ Diaspora dissidents can credibly ruin a state’s international reputation.

Motivation


Digital Transnational Repression1

  • ICTs lower costs, limit attribution, expand the reach of governments beyond their borders.
  • Limited regulations on foreign social media enable governments to leverage technical vulnerabilities to silence/discredit regime threats.

Nationalism and ICTs2

  • Nationalism involves building a cohesive identity, suppressing minority and diverging voices.
  • Communication technologies enable the standardization of nationalist rhetoric and imagery.
  • Leveraging national identity may not be perceived as vitriol/hate speech on the global stage.

How do pro-government actors evade accountability for attacking diaspora regime critics on foreign social media?

They can leverage facets of national identity to evade consequences for their targeted vitriol.

Theoretical Expectations

Attacking women and gender minorities is considered to be “more acceptable”1.

  • Feminists have a relatively high capacity to mobilize support.
  • Strongman politics ➡️ gendered curtailments of the public sphere are taken less seriously.

🔎 Hypothesis 1: Women* are more likely to be targeted with toxic tweets compared to men.


Strategic use of language can reinforce national identity and protect a state’s global reputation2.

  • Language education policies have suppressed language minorities in a variety of contexts.
  • Vitriol in globally accessible languages might be more heavily scrutinized.

🔎 Hypothesis 2: Tweets in English are less likely to be toxic compared to tweets in Chinese.

Context: Chinese Repression of Uyghur/Turkic Muslims


  • Since 2017, the Chinese government has imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs and Turkic-speaking ethnic minorities
    (Maizland 2022)
  • Approximately 11 million Uyghurs are subject to surveillance and state-sponsored information controls
  • 7,106 confirmed cases of transnational repression targeting exile and diaspora regime critics in 44 countries since 1997
    (Lemon, Jardine, and Hall 2022)

Source: AFP via Getty Images

Data on Prominent Diaspora Regime Critics


Chinese Transnational Repression of Uyghurs (CTRU)1

  • Incidents conducted by the PRC, targeting citizens from the Uyghur Region since 1997
  • Cases identified from existing reports, newswires, global datasets; verified by diaspora groups
  • Degree of repression measured on a 3-point ordinal scale

Sampling criteria

  • 2+ incidents of stage 1 repression; being put on notice (threats, arrest warrants, etc.)
  • Has a Twitter account

➡️ Gender-balanced sample of 22 prominent diaspora regime critics

Twitter Data

  • 66 queries (full name, usernames, names without spaces) using Twitter’s Academic API🪦
  • 75,148 tweets (161,586 individual mentions) in English and Chinese, 2017-2022
  • Analyses conducted at the level of individual mentions

Empirical Strategy

Identifying Pro-government Tweets




Empirical Strategy

Identifying Pro-government Tweets

Empirical Strategy

Measuring Toxicity

  • Does a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment make the target leave a discussion?
  • Estimated with the API
  • Adjustments to be made for measurement biases based on pronouns used and language

Preliminary Analysis


Based on t-tests using the manually labeled pro-CCP tweets…

  • H1: Women more likely to be targeted with toxicity ✅
  • H2: Chinese tweets more likely to be toxic ❎

Conclusion

  • States that engage in domestic human rights abuses have a vested interest in suppressing diaspora dissent on foreign social media.

  • Pro-government actors—while varied in their affiliations and motives—can weaponize national identity to play into global norms; evade platforms’ community guidelines

  • Preliminary hypotheses demonstrate that women are more likely to be targeted with vitriol, while differences in the use of language are unclear.

  • This paper offers an empirical basis for taking a target-centered approach to studying the “grey areas” of digital transnational repression on foreign platforms.

Next steps

  • Improve BERT-based models to scale up tweet labels and analyses
  • Adjusting for gender/language measurement biases

Thank you!

koh@hertie-school.org

https://allisonkoh.github.io/

@allisonwkoh@mastodon.social🎓

@allisonwkoh@fosstodon.org📊

@allisonkoh_

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